How Can I Use Automation to Improve the Candidate Experience?

Fostering a positive candidate experience is crucial in both the success and growth of your business. Candidates are the lifeblood of your firm and without high-quality candidates available, you run the risk of losing opportunities. Happy candidates will continue to work with you for their next role and may even recommend your firm to those in their network. Unhappy candidates can pose a risk to your reputation or even the business of your clients.

Take Virgin Media as an example. Back in 2016, they calculated that they were losing $5.4 million a year, purely from rejected candidates who had poor experiences. These rejected candidates were also customers and switched providers within a month of rejection, citing the poor application process as the reason. While what happened to Virgin Media may not be directly related to your space, it highlights how much the candidate experience impacts brand reputation.

Although some can improve their candidate processes by hiring more recruiters or through expensive training, not everyone is able to afford that luxury. However, with automation, you can take efforts to provide a positive experience for your candidates while leaving time for your team to focus on high priority opportunities.

Unique communications tailored to each individual candidate

One of the largest benefits to automating your candidate communication is that you can tailor your message to different phases in the candidate process. Using the same workflows in Bullhorn, you can use one of our marketplace partners to send messages as soon as the candidate’s status changes. By incorporating these automated messages throughout the candidate process, you can keep them engaged with your brand without your team needing to personally keep up with each candidate.

Using products like Herefish, you can customize your messaging and set up campaigns for communicating with your candidates throughout the application process. Contact them via email or even text so you can engage with them at the right moments. These messages are also a great opportunity to solicit feedback from candidates and see how their experience changes at each step. With Herefish, you can ask them to provide a single rating to receive quick feedback on a specific step in the application process. If you want to obtain more in-depth feedback on the process as a whole, you can quickly spin up full-length surveys with the SurveyStore from Starred.

Setting up these automations may take a significant amount of time in the beginning, but by establishing your campaigns you will ensure that you can consistent touchpoints with your candidates. And the feedback you receive will only serve to help you improve your processes.

Gather and process candidate feedback

After setting up your messaging campaigns, it would behoove you to also set up when and how you gather candidate feedback. For example, you can ask the candidate how prepared they felt going into the interview in an email sent right after the interview has been conducted. With Herefish, you can set up prompts so that immediate action can be taken based on the result of a single rating:

Rated 7 – 10: A thank you email is sent to the candidate for their input and an alert is sent to the recruiter to notify them of the feedback.

Rated 1 – 6: A follow-up email is sent to the candidate prompting for additional feedback either in a comment field or via a phone call with the recruiter. A subsequent alert is sent to the recruiter informing them of the score and suggesting a personal follow-up.

With these quick alerts, your team will know when they are at risk of losing a candidate and can prioritize accordingly. And over time, the feedback gathered from these automated check-ins or surveys can be analyzed to determine where you can improve the candidate process. Bullhorn Marketplace partners, such as Sense, provide extensive reporting and dashboards to help uncover where the candidate experience may be scoring low in surveys.

Automated feedback tools and messaging provide a means to take a more data-driven approach to provide a positive candidate experience. But one significant benefit of a solid automation process is that it allows your team the ability to provide a human touch when it is most necessary.

Merge human touch with automation

Like in the example above, the alerts and follow-up emails produced based on candidate feedback help notify you when it may be time to reach out personally. Without these alerts, recruiters are only left to their own devices to monitor the progress and state of each candidate. The increased bandwidth offered by automation allows recruiters more time to spend working to get candidates across the finish line for high priority opportunities.

And the human touch can be placed on the messages themselves. Many of these tools offer fully customizable messaging to allow authors to add their own personal flair to the emails and texts their candidates receive.

Automation is largely beneficial to ensuring you are able to keep on top of the feedback loop for each of your candidates. Through the usage of custom messaging, surveys, and reporting tools, automation makes it easier to gather the data you need to improve the candidate process. But most importantly, automation combined with the recruiter’s personal touch ensure that a candidate has the assistance they need to make the next step in their career.

Categories

Search

We understand that it’s not business as usual for our customers at this time. Bullhorn is committed to enabling you to continue to provide a positive experience for your candidates and clients.

ABOUT BULLHORN

Bullhorn is the global leader in software for the staffing industry. More than 11,000 companies rely on Bullhorn’s cloud-based platform to power their staffing processes from start to finish. Headquartered in Boston, with offices around the world, Bullhorn is founder-led and employs more than 1,000 people globally. To learn more, visit www.bullhorn.com or follow @bullhorn on Twitter.

Get Your Price Quote Today

Call us to schedule a demo. (888) 465-4838

Thank you. We will be in touch shortly!

Jonathan Novich

SVP of Product and Salesforce

Jonathan Novich is SVP of Product and Salesforce for Bullhorn, the global leader in CRM and operations software for the recruitment industry. A staffing technology innovator, he has developed broad and deep product and technical experience consulting to staffing firms over the past 15 years. Jonathan has acted as an independent consultant for some of the largest staffing companies in the world and advised companies on acquisition targets.
At Bullhorn, he oversees product initiatives as more than 10,000 staffing companies rely on Bullhorn’s cloud-based platform to drive sales, build relationships, and power their recruitment processes from end to end. He graduated with honors from Princeton University, earning a Bachelor of Science in Engineering in Computer Science and a certificate in Operations Research.

Ed Holmes

SVP, Workforce & Revenue Cloud

As Bullhorn’s SVP of Workforce & Revenue Cloud, Ed drives the company’s middle office strategy and overall product offering. Ed joined Bullhorn as part of the Peoplenet acquisition where he spent 7 years as the President/CEO leading up to the acquisition in late 2017. Prior to joining the Bullhorn family, Ed has spent his career designing, building and managing technology solutions for numerous Fortune 500 companies. He has been a Partner in an ERP-focused consulting firm, a CIO for a global pharmaceutical company, a supply-chain leader for a retail company and the leader of a services company from its inception to $50MM in revenue. Ed was born in Florida but has spent the last 20+ years in Atlanta, GA. Ed loves to play golf, tennis and basketball and occasionally gets out kite boarding when the wind is just right.

Ed holds a Bachelor of Science in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and an MBA from Goizueta Business School at Emory University.

Brian Sylvester

CFO

Brian Sylvester is Bullhorn’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO) with more than 15 years of financial leadership experience. Brian leads Bullhorn’s financial, accounting, and legal functions. Prior to becoming CFO, Brian spent three years at Bullhorn in various finance & accounting roles. Prior to Bullhorn, Brian was Corporate Controller at Pegasystems, a global provider of business process management software where he scaled the finance organization during a period of 2.5x revenue growth. Brian began his career at PricewaterhouseCoopers in their technology audit practice.

Brian is a CPA in Massachusetts, has a Master’s of Science in Accounting from Boston College and a Bachelor’s of Science in Accounting from Bryant University.

Tamsyn Attiwell

SVP, Customer Success

As the Senior Vice President of Customer Success, Tamsyn leads Bullhorn’s Services and Customer Success teams. She is responsible for the successful delivery of all products and services globally and is committed to creating and maintaining incredible long-term customer experiences in the Candidate to Cash process. Tamsyn has been delivering implementations for over 25 years with companies such as SAP, Ariba, Zuora and Apttus: specializing in HR, Payroll, Procurement and Quote To Cash capability. She trained as a software engineer after studying Maths, Statistics, and Computing in England.

Art Papas

Founder & CEO

Art Papas is the Founder and CEO of Bullhorn, Inc, the global leader in software for the staffing & recruitment industry. Art was the original architect of Bullhorn’s flagship Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, which now helps more than 8,000 companies around the world run their businesses. Art is the Chairman of the Board at Career Collaborative, an organization that teaches unemployed and underemployed adults how to build careers that change lives and strengthen families. In 2014, Ernst & Young named Art an EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award Winner in New England. Prior to starting Bullhorn, Art started his career as a software engineer at Thomson Reuters. Art is a graduate of Tufts University, holding a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics.

Matt Fischer

President and Chief Technology Officer

As President and CTO, Matt leads Bullhorn’s architectural, technical, and software design and development efforts. He also directs the product management team’s work defining product strategy, and global customer support and success. Since joining Bullhorn in 2004, Matt has held a variety of leadership positions managing the growth of various technical and services teams, including Vice President of Professional Services. Prior to Bullhorn, Matt worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers, specializing in systems process assurance for such companies as Fidelity and State Street Global Advisors. Matt holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration with a concentration in Finance from Boston University’s School of Management.

Mike Restivo

Chief Revenue Officer

As Bullhorn’s Chief Revenue Officer, Mike drives the company’s global revenue growth. Mike was one of the first 15 team members of Bullhorn Inc. in Boston and relocated to London in 2010 to start up the International team. In his 6 years in London, Mike drove regional expansion into the Netherlands, Germany, Singapore, and Australia. He has supplied cloud-based solutions to recruitment consultancies in over 50 different countries worldwide for the past 10 years. Mike was born and raised in the Boston-area where he grew up an avid sport fan. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Business Management from Babson College.

Kristin Machacek Leary

Chief People Officer

Kristin oversees Bullhorn’s human resources function in her role as Chief People Officer. Kristin joined Bullhorn in 2020 and is responsible for helping Bullhorn scale to the next level, build leadership capacity, and accelerate growth in global markets. Kristin brings to the role over 20 years of experience leading high-potential companies through breakthrough growth and brings a depth of knowledge in organizational design, scalable processes, and flexible systems culled from some of the most successful global companies in the world. Leary joins Bullhorn from Hitachi Vantara, where she served as Chief Human Resources Officer, and before that she worked as Chief Human Resources Officer at Forcepoint, a private equity-backed company with 3,000 employees operating in more than 45 countries. She has also worked at high-growth enterprise technology companies like Alphatec Spine, Boston Scientific, and Hewlett-Packard.

Peter Linas

Executive Vice President of Corporate Development and International

Peter oversees Bullhorn’s international operations across EMEA and APAC in his role as Executive Vice President of Corporate Development and International. Peter joined Bullhorn in 2009 and was responsible for its highly successful UK launch. In addition to growing the international team to over 50 staff and establishing Bullhorn as the UK’s market leading recruitment software in fewer than three years, Peter has expanded Bullhorn’s reach into EMEA and APAC and achieved a user base of more than 10,000 international users. Prior to taking on the launch of Bullhorn in the UK, Peter spent 20 years working in the recruitment industry and held a number of senior director roles before moving into the technology space.

Ryan Murphy

Executive Vice President of Enterprise and Salesforce

Ryan Murphy is the Executive Vice President of Enterprise and Salesforce. He began his 10-year career at Bullhorn as a finance and sales intern, affording him a 360-degree view of the software-as-a-service industry and Bullhorn’s business model. Prior to his current role, Ryan served as an Enterprise Account Executive where he honed his customer-first leadership style and championed Bullhorn’s offerings to its most strategic clients. Today, Murphy is charged with leading the enterprise strategy and go to market for both Bullhorn and Bullhorn for Salesforce, enabling customers to maximize their investments on both platforms and deliver an incredible experience to their customers and candidates. Ryan has a Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration from Boston University.